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Template:Removed

For the future, if you ever want to fix something like you did for VimTip470 (in this diff), there is an extra parameter that I added at some stage. For example, VimTip5 contains this wikitext:

{{Removed|5|info=Tip 5 has been merged to [[VimTip1]]|prev=4|next=6}}

So, you could insert the 'info=...' with a redirect, if you wanted. Or, just do the redirect which is almost certainly what I would do for any newly removed tip. I'm just mentioning the 'info=...' parameter FYI. JohnBeckett 23:24, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

New tips catchup

With a reasonably small amount of effort we could get up to date with the new tips. April and May are already finished, so a few decisions on Jan/Feb/Mar will do the job. When you have some time, could you provide input at 201001? Then I'll have a go at the next month, and in a week or two we should catch up. Thanks. JohnBeckett 10:17, June 16, 2010 (UTC)

Help request for misc. Vim features

Hi,

I'm really glad to see the documentation on vi, but it seems painfully hard to find answers to a few questions I had on vi

Regarding folding, how can I tag lines so that I know where the folds are located in a document. If I create a whole bunch of folds, I'd like to maybe see some prefix character in the sidebar showing where those folds are. I recall doing this once, so I'm pretty sure it's possible

Working with multiple files in vi has been a bit difficult. I think I can use :bn and :bp to go between them right? Is it possible to see all the files that I've opened with vi?

Macros sometimes exhibit peculiar behavior. I record a macro, but then when I repeat it, if it's a sufficiently complex macro, it does something totally unexpected at times. I think the last time I ran into this, I was trying to search for text that had a quote in it, so maybe when the macro recorded what I was typing, it interpreted the quote as referring to a buffer instead of being part of the string I was searching?

I really want to make full use of vi. Is there some page with some neat tricks you can do in vi that will save you time and typing?

Thanks!

sorry...i don't think that was the right place to put the comment. Please forward my questions above to the right person/location? Thanks, I greatly appreciate it!

However, your particular questions are not too hard to answer, at least to some extent.

It sounds like you want to turn on the fold column. Just set it to some number, like :set foldcolumn=4. See :help 'foldcolumn'.

See Buffers for a buffer switching introduction. Also see the links to further tips at the end of that page. For your specific question, the :ls command does what you ask. Also, did you know Vim can open multiple buffers at the same time in split windows, or even tab pages?

I'm not sure what you mean. Macros do exactly what you told them, and then terminate on an error. I'd suggest going to vim_use for this one, and be sure to give a specific problem to solve, and not a generic "does something unexpected". Sometimes user mappings can interfere with macros. You can see if these are your problem by running Vim without your user configuration: vim -N -u NONE -i NONE

I'd suggest the tips in Category:Getting started, and also browsing the :help files. One thing in particular that has saved me a lot of time, is Vim's "text object" feature: :help text-objects. I also learned a lot about Vim from following discussions on vim_use, and from hitting the "Random page" link in the sidebar on this wiki every day.

Some of these are pretty basic questions...I'd again suggest taking a look at our tips for new users.

Also please note...you're using Vim, not vi. There is a difference and you'll get better responses on places like the vim_use mailing list and (especially) #vim on freenode if you use the proper name.

By the way...it would be a good idea to create a username on the wiki, so you can sign your comments with ~~~~, as I have done below.

delete some spam pages.

Thanks, and thanks for reverting the vandalism by the anonymous user. I've deleted the pages and permanently blocked the spam account, and temporarily blocked the IP of the vandal. --Fritzophrenic 15:30, December 9, 2010 (UTC)

Not much going on?

Hi there! I just decided to sign up and I wanted to introduce myself. I have been a long time lurker on Vim Tips. Mostly, well, I use the tips. But recently I have been getting more and more into the Vim community and I noticed that this wiki isn't seeing a lot of action. I think the community is still going strong but I fear that the Vim Tips isn't getting the support it deserves. I wonder if there is anything I can do to help specifically? Thanks!
Trcollinson 22:58, January 1, 2011 (UTC)

You're right, it has been a little slow recently. I think a lot of people are turned off by Wikia's new format. Our most active editor and administrator, JohnBeckett, has been missing in action for a few months now (still fuming over the way wikia handled the new look rollout, I understand) so I've been keeping shop here since with help from a few other contributors who have flagged spam, corrected typos, and the like. And of course, added tips.

A few things need doing. First of all, there are still a bunch of tips that got imported and never really cleaned up satisfactorily. You can find these in Category:Review. Secondly, we have flagged many tips with a {{todo}} flag, you can find these in Category:Todo. Most of these tips have a note at the beginning of the Comments section saying what needs to be done. Finally, we need to catch up on getting our newly added "proposed new tips" decided on and hopefully John can come back and use his bot to assign tip IDs. See Vim_Tips_Wiki:New_tips. If it gets to be a few months later I may start doing it manually.

I'm not sure that there is much we can do to drum up support in the community other than continue to improve the resource, but I'm glad you want to help.

I can see why JohnBeckett would be upset. A lot of the other wikia wiki's I use have been having a similar problem with the switch. But such is life I guess.

I am looking over these lists and wow! There is a ton of content there. I see a lot of it needs to be merged and rewritten. But a lot of the todo's (and honestly the reviews as well) have a note that they need to be merged but it doesn't seem like a lot of merging is happening. Is that because of time requirements on you and such or is the merging process just hard? I'll take a look at those and start helping. Thanks for the info!

Yeah, there's a lot to do and not very many people doing it. Obviously the most fun thing is submitting new material but a lot of the old material still needs some attention and it doesn't often get it.

If you're working on merging tips (a worthy endeavor) take a quick glance at our merge guidelines first. Remember that you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of time merging in useless content. Sometimes a "merge" is just providing a redirect to a better solution. Most of the time though, there should be something useful to include in the merge.

Checking in

Howdy! I just wanted to check in and see how things are. I noticed that the theme changed. Is this the way the theme was originally? I was also curious as to whether you know if JohnBeckett may ever come back? Is he reachable? If not maybe in the future it would be advantageous to create a new bot to handle some of the activies JohnBot was handling. I have developed a number of wikibots in the past and would be glad to help. If I can do anything let me know. As always, if you have any suggestions on my editing I always appreciate it. Thanks!
Trcollinson 21:38, January 9, 2011 (UTC)

Hello again! I'll shoot John an email in the next day or two, he's usually pretty responsive to that. I am hoping to get him to resume some of his JohnBot activities (like applying templates to newly created tips, for example). As for the theme, this is still the "new wikia look." The change you noticed was me accepting the new theme and deciding to see what it had to offer. I finally got around to uploading an image of the Vim logo for the "wordmark" for the wiki, and decided the site ought to be a matching color. I just grabbed one of the pre-made color schemes and didn't try anything fancy. If people complain it can be changed back. If you have suggestions I'm pretty open as well. Details on the "new look" can be found here:

I think it looks fine with me. Although I think the site look and feel can have a lot of importance for a project, I think Vim Tips has a lot bigger "fish to fry" so to speak moving forward, at least at the moment. I would stick with the green though!

As for John, I was just floating around the site on my phone (where it's hard to edit things, but easy to read), and I noticed that in his talk page there was a lot more discussion a few months ago then there is now. I would love to see things ramp up again and I think it can happen (maybe I am just super optimistic by nature, but what the hay). So I hope we comes back :) he seemed to be a big help just as you are and I hope maybe I will be as well someday. I think what you, he and others have done for the community is a great thing. So I guess this is my simple way of saying thanks!

Greetings. I hate the idea of slaving for Wikia who have us in a very ugly position. However, that is the position we are in, and the community should have a Vim Tips wiki, so I suppose we should get on with it. I am busy in other places but will be able to resume JohnBot stuff in a few days. I have not yet looked over what's been happening much, but it appears Trcollinson is exactly what we need to get back on track. Thanks! I must warn everyone that I am rather more grumpy and impatient than in the past. I have not yet looked at the "new tips" situation, but I am inclined to deal with them in an accelerated manner without some of the dithering and being nice to everyone that we have done in the past. Yes, being nice is good and it is the only way to build collaboration. But if we have evidence that collaboration is not forthcoming (for example, if somone has dumped a 60%-finished tip here and disappeared), we need to be realistic. I'm not going to start a delete rampage, but I'll be looking for practical ideas of how to catch up (which will probably involve a fair bit of deleting). I have just dropped in to provide this update. See you all in due course. JohnBeckett 10:23, January 16, 2011 (UTC)

Welcome back Mr. Beckett :) glad to finally can the chance to see you. I am not fully aware of the history of wikia or what they have done. However, one of my suggestions would be, why don't we just move the whole Vim Tips elsewhere? I guess I am just trying to understand the background a bit better.

As for continuing the work, let me know where you would like help, and I will. I can do just about anything and my time will be freeing up here more shortly. I believe in the Vim tips project as I have been using it for so many years and I would love to see it keep going. However, I think your point about accelerating the work here is actually a very good thing. I have worked on a lot of wiki's and the thing that I have noticed which gets new editors moving is seeing other editors moving as well. The "if you build it, they will come" methodology. So anyway, I will try to keep the editing up at an even pace, and hope we can make things better in the next few months!

It's a bit too tedious to explain, but in brief Wikia have changed the skin dramatically while showing an arrogant disregard for the different wiki communities. The problem is that, due to the hard work of those disregarded communities, Wikia now has a good Google ranking. If we were to copy this wiki elsewhere, it would be pretty well impossible to outrank vim.wikia.com. People searching for stuff would go to Wikia and would never realise that the official wiki was elsewhere. There is not much interest in vim.wikia.com (apart from people using Google to find a quick solution to some problem of the moment), and there would be essentially no interest in a clone. The main problem with the skin is the absurd focus on trivia (the top and side bars), with the content squeezed in as an after thought.

I'll take a week or two to work out what has been happening here (looks like Fritzophrenic has done a great job with the logo and menus at the top), and may have some suggestions for how people can help in due course. Probably the best thing would be to sort out the new tips. JohnBeckett 09:09, January 17, 2011 (UTC)

I understand WOW's wiki did in fact move, with limited success. While they have a big community outside the wiki where they were able to spread the word that the wiki had moved, there is still a lot of activity on the wiki here.

John, one thing i did while you were gone, is changed the wording of the "Proposed tip" template to read "Newly created tip" or something like that, since they tend to stick around in "proposed" state longer than we originally intended.

As for the skin, it gave me TONS of problems at the beginning. I think it is still broken in IE7 to some extent, but I had to upgrade at work so I'm not certain anymore. They did finally fix all the issues I had in Opera (issues that were preventing me from logging in with javascript enabled), but I think they were targeting some other problem on a different browser when they did (Opera is not officially supported). I do admit that it does look "fresh" and "modern" which will certainly appeal to a broader audience for many wikis...but that sort of thing never really mattered on this wiki.

I see the point there now, no doubt. I think my current personal thinking to jump in both feet first and try to update and clean up as much of the content as I can is still the best move I can make. There is a ton of content which still needs to be cleaned up from the original move, merged, or just plain removed, so I will continue on with that and see where it gets me.

I also think some people have forgotten that Vim Tips is here. I think you're right John that people have the most interest in Vim Tips when they need an answer to an immediate problem. But really that is the same situation many people have with Wikipedia. I think the community as a whole will support the effort. I have been tweeting about it, and posting on Facebook about it and I think I need to do it somemore. Even mentioning it in the #vim channel on freenode. I am hoping it will help :) I think it will in time. It's a big ship, and it moves slowly, but with good momentum it will keep going. At any rate, I am glad to see you back around :)

Main Page Issue?

Hey there, I am having trouble with the front page of the wiki. Every time I go to it it redirects me to Resize which is a page that does not exist. I checked the source for the page, but it had nothing unusual in it. Are you having this problem? Do you see why I might be redirected like I am seeing?

Once or twice sometime earlier this month, I did get redirected to some other page. I do not remember which page it was, but it stopped doing that after only a couple times. Now it redirects me to WikiActivity as John says. I looked through the preferences and found a "Disable my redirect to Wiki Activity" option under "Misc" but did not see anything about redirecting to last edited page or anything like that (which is what I was looking for). I am trying out this option now, because like John I rarely look at that page. I have an RSS feed set up so I see all the changes anyway. –Fritzophrenic 15:27, January 27, 2011 (UTC)

Help, Community portal and script followed

Hi,

Thanks for your welcome note. Actually, I was wondering about some tips for this wiki. I didn't find any help, have I missed it?? Sorry if it is hidden somewhere and I should have looked better... Also, there are some links at the top of each page, one being "Community portal", but this page has never been created :-S

So, my first question before those arised was about the followed pages. I am following some Vim Tips, but also some pages about the scripts of vim.org. The latter do not appear in my list of followed pages... Is this a bug? If not, how can I have the complete list of my followed pages?

I have not yet figured out how to show scripts in my "followed pages", however every followed page is also added to your "watchlist" which you can view: Special:Watchlist. You can even add this to that floating toolbar at the bottom. I have added it to mine but I'm still not sure whether I like it or not. Just type "Watchlist" in the dialog and click it with the mouse in the popup. Once on the watchlist page, there are also links to edit or view it there. I have my preferences set up to email me if something on my watchlist is updated, I think this also works for Script: pages but am not really sure. John?

Thanks for the hint about community portal being broken. Somehow the automated thing which used to work stopped working. I have updated the navigation bar to point to the correct page and created a redirect with the alternate capitalization just in case.

Additional help is in Category:Help. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any more questions.

In theory there should be no difference in following or watching a normal tip or a script: if your preferences include an email address and the default to send you an email alert on changes to watched pages, you should get an email for each change to a script page. I imagine the public "followed pages" has some code to only list pages in the main namespace (i.e. tips). For example, you might have a reason to watch some templates (like Template:Help) and your interest would be due to a particular requirement that is unlikely to apply to general users. The "followed pages" stuff is an attempt to generate interest in the articles on a wiki, so while I don't recall seeing any documentation about it, it would make sense for only main namespace pages to be listed in "followed pages". The Special:Watchlist page should show all watched/followed pages (the default view on that page will only show recent changes to watched pages; click "View and edit watchlist" or "Edit raw watchlist" to see the actual list). JohnBeckett 09:19, January 30, 2011 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for the reply. As I did not find any link to my watchlist, I assumed it was here called the followed pages and that is why I was wondering where were the scripts followed. So with the watchlist I understand better. But I think there should be a link to the watchlist in the menu of the top right corner, since it may be as useful as the list of the followed pages... Thanks for all. --XonqNopp(T|C) 13:54, February 2, 2011 (UTC)

There is some info on following/watchlists that I wrote when the "following" feature was introduced, see Community portal. The core facts are correct, but the buttons have all moved around (it's still worth reading). There is a link (Special:Watchlist) on the portal page. If you wanted fast access to the standard watchlist you could use a browser bookmark for that page. Wikia have just tweaked "My Tools" in the stupid floating bar at the bottom of each page, and there is a "Customize" link that allows you to fiddle with things, and I believe you can add Watchlist to the My Tools menu. There is some info at Help:MyTools (possibly out of date). JohnBeckett 09:38, February 3, 2011 (UTC)

New tips done to 201005

Would you please check my recent changes relating to New tips. I think we are ready to wrap up 2010 02+03+04+05. If you agree (or don't disagree!) I will process all those together and allocate new tip ids (for those you haven't done; I know the last tip is VimTip1650). JohnBeckett 09:37, April 16, 2011 (UTC)

Signatures

Re your signature correction at Script:974, just in case you are not aware, four tildes gives name+date, three gives name, five gives date. So, you accidentally added an extra tilde to the normal four. I'll use all three below:

You're definitely right in your reply, and a little more search brought me to the correct solution. I'd want to put it here, in case someone, like me before, was looking for it.

The fact is, that solution is in a forum thread on an external web site, and I obviously want to cite the source. My question is: is it correct / well-mannered to put here an external link? Maybe that question is trivial, but I'm a wiki-newbie and I'd want to be a good boy. :)

It's sometimes a tough call. The only "policy" we have on this that I know of, is our general guidelines, which state that a tip should be self contained. So avoid "see siteXYZ for a solution to this problem", instead put the relevant script in the tip text. Alternatively, you could add a link in the "See also" section, if the site is relevant. The problem here is to avoid looking like you're just promoting a personal blog or something.

In terms of citing a source in the tip text, if this external web forum is well-known (stackoverflow, etc.), especially if it is well-known in the Vim community (the vim_use mailing list, etc.) then often a very simple reference is OK (but not required). Keep in mind that on this wiki at least, we encourage wholesale editing of scripts within a tip without regard to keeping it in line with the original source, so the final result may differ significantly from the original. So you shouldn't say "this solution from siteXYZ", you should say "this solution inspired by a discussion on siteXYZ" or similar. An example of this can be found in our File no longer available - mark buffer modified tip which started as a direct copy from the linked vim_use thread.

The main thing to avoid is links to blog posts, etc. which could be construed as trying to promote the blog. These will usually get removed. Exceptions can be made for well-known sites made by prominent members of the Vim community like Bram, Dr. Chip, Tony M., and others, but I can not think of any examples of this in the text itself. Mostly these are listed in a "see also" as on our Building Vim tip. But again, since scripts are pretty much edited without a thought to the original, unless you're presenting alternatives to a well-known solution (like in a :help file), it's probably best not to attribute it directly to the external site.

To sum up: if it's a prominent site, and you want to give credit, go ahead. If you don't feel like it, that's probably OK too.

And by the way, don't worry about being "too enthusiastic" about an update. First, if it's a short snippet or small update like you left, someone will probably notice fairly quickly. There's little enough activity that John, I, and a few others usually notice all changes. Additionally, if it's in the comments section like your update, the comments section is specifically intended to provide a place for "drive-by edits" which may or may not work perfectly as-is.

The situation is awkward because while it is not ethical to just take a tip from elsewhere and dump it here without attribution, the alternative of methodically crediting everyone who contributed to an idea is impossible and ugly. It's quite likely that a random tip about Vim found on the Internet originated somewhere else (for example, a Vim mailing list or from a tip here), although often the original advice was improved by whoever posted it. There are plenty of exceptions where people do post original material, but they are uncommon.

Bob, please post a brief statement of the problem here (what problem would the solution solve?). One of us may have a suggestion on what might be added to the tip without needing an external site. We do not have to cover every piece of information. JohnBeckett 07:05, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

Hi, and thank you all again for your kindess. My goal was to simple display the tab number on the tab line, to allow fast tab navigation with {count}gt.

Maybe it's trivial, but as a semi-newbie, I had a hard way in finding an example of how to achieve this in Vim. I finally found a good .vimrc recipe in the last post of this thread, and I'd want to make life easier for others.

It would be great if there was a way to simple improve my "tip" code, but at the moment, this is out of my sight. :)

Ah, that's just a mirror of the vim_use mailing list. Here's the original: http://groups.google.com/group/vim_use/browse_thread/thread/de954baf798fc92c . I'd just cite it as "inspired by a vim_use thread about setting the tabline" or similar. But really your current suggestion is so different from what appears in the thread, I don't believe it needs citing, unless you modify it to be much more similar. I note that in Tony's suggested solution, the tabpagenr() function is used for getting the max/current tab number, but mostly the tab numbers are determined via a loop counter. This should work much better than the buffer number you were using. --Fritzophrenic 14:54, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

Code background

Setting the background color for stuff like :helpgrep example or press n for "search next" is good. But MediaWiki:Wikia.css sets background-color 00FF63, while MediaWiki:Common.css is 00C84E, and both of those are a very prominent green on my system. How does Searching look on your browser? Would something more subtle be a better default? Here is EEE8AA and here is FAF0E6, for example. JohnBeckett (talk) 11:39, October 3, 2012 (UTC)

I gave up because even clearing my browser cache I was unable to get the background colors to apply to anything except for User:Fritzophrenic/Sandbox. The MediaWiki:Common.css did not apply at all, even to my sandbox, as I found when I tried expanding the text to force the nowrap to come into play. I thought I just failed to affect any of the main pages so gave up in frustration. Yes, I was going for a much more subtle color, but I wanted to use a lighter shade of the dark green background. The one in MediaWiki:Common.css is as light as it goes, and I didn't start experimenting with other green colors (I want green to match the theme) because like I said I couldn't get it to load anyway. If you find a color you like please go ahead and use it. --Fritzophrenic (talk) 15:04, October 3, 2012 (UTC)

P.S. FAF0E6 is a little too light for me...on my current monitor it's barely distinguishable from the background. Maybe something like C1E7CB, based on the background of the page header, B2D5BB. I just grab the color from "inspect element" in Opera or Chrome and use http://drpeterjones.com/colorcalc/ to lighten the value.

Why just tips?

I saw you deleted my easytags page. I find it very confusing to have some stuff on vim.org and some stuff here. A lot of wiki pages link back to vim.org using id-links to the scripts. In generally I find it easier to memorize the name of a plugin rather than it's id. Vim.org feels unmaintained and dated. Wouldn't it be nicer to make this wiki the main vim.org and only link to current vim.org for the plugin-downloads? Maybe even that could be handled using mediawiki in some way.

Yes, it is easier to memorize a plugin name than an ID. But you can search vim.org for a plugin name just like you can search here. We link to vim.org with the script template which takes an ID as a convenience, to avoid copy-pasting entire URLs. The pages like Script:3114 which link back to vim.org automatically by tip ID were created some time ago in response to a request by script authors to allow meaningful feedback on their scripts. Authors were getting frustrated by negative ratings with no explanation, and users did not like that there was no sort of review feature. Rather than opening vim.org up to spam, Bram added a link to the wiki in a special Script namespace. So, these pages are not meant to be the front page of a script. They are only meant to provide feedback to script authors. The Vim community as a whole has no interest in making this wiki a replacement for vim.org, so for now vim.org is the primary source. Trying to maintain two pages would just get confusing, and we would need buy-in from authors to keep the wiki up to date. There is no way we can make a page for each of the 1000s of scripts on vim.org and keep it up-to-date with the few regular contributors here.

Sure - the pages would have to be converted into this wiki like the tips were and plugin pages updated by their writers here. As most of us here probably are programmers that should be doable. I think it would make editing this wiki a lot more rewarding and user friendly. Script authors could than just use wiki links to pathogen and help pages in their plugins description - once here in the wiki: maybe that would even encourage them to become regular contributers. Vimdicitve (talk) 22:04, October 4, 2012 (UTC)

One thing I didn't mention above is that as far as I know, wikia is not available in China due to The Great Firewall, whereas vim.org is available. There are quite a few Chinese Vim users who would then be virtually unable to find up-to-date script information. Granted, the same can now be said about the tips on the current wiki. --Fritzophrenic (talk) 14:43, October 5, 2012 (UTC)

The other plugin pages you created will probably be deleted in the next day or two. They hadn't showed up in my RSS feed yet when I saw the easytags page. I think we can probably keep (but rename) a couple like plugin-manager to discuss the usual method of installing Vim plugins, why this is hard, and what plugins are available to make it easier.

As a personal preference I also think the default mediawiki layout - that I have now set in my preferences - is a lot more intuitive and easier to navigate especially if you're new here like me.
Best regards.
Vimdicitve (talk) 20:18, October 4, 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear you found that in your preferences. Unfortunately there's not much we can do to change the default layout. Wikia (for-profit as they are) limits us quite a bit in that regard.

By the way, I went ahead and got rid of the plugin pages in favor of the Script namespace pages. While you make a good point about the usability of a wiki over the static vim.org page, it's not really something we can do without buy-in from script authors. Many of them are already using github or sourceforge for their main project page anyway. If you want to try getting the needed buy-in, you can hit up the vim_dev and/or vim_use mailing lists: Vim_Tips_Wiki:Community Portal#Asking questions. --Fritzophrenic (talk) 03:52, October 9, 2012 (UTC)

Undo and Redo

Thanks for removing the obsolete comment at Undo and Redo which did look out of place. I wondered why I started musing about CTRL/Ctrl and R/r so looked at the history. It was in response to edits by three different IPs a few hours before (two of them thought that "Ctrl-R" was incorrect). I still can't make up my mind whether tips should prefer "Ctrl-R" or "Ctrl-r", and you know I like consistency. That's pretty trivial so I won't let it worry me. BTW it will be another few weeks before I get back to work here, but I will return. JohnBeckett (talk) 03:29, November 10, 2012 (UTC)

Wikia contacted re spam

Thanks. I meant to do it but didn't have the time to bother with more than a block/delete. --Fritzophrenic (talk) 15:46, December 7, 2012 (UTC)

The response from Wikia was disappointing, essentially saying "good job, keep it up". It seems they are relying on volunteers (who have been assigned extra privileges) to do the work. The message is to contact VSTF who will clean up (typically within an hour, with blocks and cleanup done behind-the-scenes so they are not seen in Recent Changes). I'm not bothering to block IPs (I would block a user) as it appears the IPs are not re-used, but if anyone wants to vent by blocking them that's fine. I don't know if we have the rights to block a range of IPs (I believe you just enter a CIDR range in the block window, but I haven't tried it and haven't looked to see how useful it would be). Here is the info in case we want to try it:

I reported the IP that I blocked (at the "report IPs here" link above), and left a request here. I have not bothered to delete the Russian spam as it will be interesting to see how it is dealt with. However, if it's still there after several hours, I might delete it (or you're welcome to do so if you like). JohnBeckett (talk) 07:52, December 9, 2012 (UTC)

Hey, I'm a member of the VSTF, a group of Wikia volunteers assigned extra tools to combat spam. As for your first point, you can block CIDR ranges from Special:Block just fine, exactly as you would do with a single IP or user. You might also consider contacting Staff to enable the AbuseFilter extension, which will allow you to set up a wide variety of local filters.

As for our blocks not showing up in the RC, that's because they are global blocks to prevent the IP from being abused elsewhere on Wikia's network. TK-999 (talk) 11:37, December 9, 2012 (UTC)

The AbuseFilter extension looks pretty powerful, but I'm not clear at all what it does. Could it be used, for example, to require that any page creations without certain keywords require the user to be logged in? I'd like to continue allowing anonymous edits as much as possible. Disallowing edits that remove the entire document text and replace it with something else unless the user is logged in would also be nice. I don't really have time to learn a complicated tool though, so if it takes too much effort to configure, and the current sustained spam rate continues, I'm more inclined to do something drastic like require a login to create any new page. John, Christian, at what point do you think this would be warranted? Or is this never an option? Obviously we'd need to ask the community, or at least Bram, before taking final action. I'm still hoping this dies down soon. --Fritzophrenic (talk) 16:19, December 10, 2012 (UTC)

Yes, all three are. As for your limited time, once Staff enabled it for you, we can configure the filters if you wish.TK-999 (talk) 17:37, December 10, 2012 (UTC)

I asked Wikia for the AbuseFilter and for it to be configured to block the current attack. That has been done (staff enabled it, and VSTF volunteer Randomtime configured it). Thanks TK-999 and Randomtime. In due course I'll look at the docs and work out how to control the filter. Let's worry about whether to attempt more drastic protection if it becomes necessary in the future (that is, if I/we can't configure the filter to do what is needed in the future). Wikia want IPs to be able to create pages, and that is an admirable aim, and not easily overturned. Occasional idiots who replace a page are not really a problem, but it is pointless battling something like the recent spambot without some tools, which we now have. In case anyone is wondering, I did not bother blocking a few IPs that I saw because there is no benefit (I think only one recent IP has edited more than once, and I blocked that one). JohnBeckett (talk) 21:39, December 10, 2012 (UTC)

Good result. There have been three hits (failed attempts to create spam pages) since the filter was enabled 36 hours ago. I configured the filter to "Hide details of this filter from public view" so the spammer cannot see what they need to do to evade it (I don't think it is likely they will even try since I think it's just someone playing with a spambot, but there is no point leaving the door open). JohnBeckett (talk) 01:22, December 12, 2012 (UTC)